When does a Company Need Software Testing?

Companies struggle to satisfy budget and time limits when hiring QA engineers. Ignoring software testing may cost a lot and lead to significant technical debts as the development life cycle opens new vulnerabilities. The later these problems are discovered, the more resources and time they need. Today, our performance testing company will tell you about the importance of Software Testing.

QA Engineers Required When Everything is OK?

You’ve probably seen or asked this question before. During the development life cycle, you may have encountered this question during the initial (or regular) production deployment, a sudden change in requirements, or customer fault complaints.

1. Define requirements/tasks

How many jobs may be completed every iteration? Once all jobs are outlined, developers assess the ideal number to develop. Due to approximate estimations, you may need to add or eliminate jobs from each development iteration. 2-4 iterations reveal the team’s capabilities. If you’re putting up new projects, frameworks, environments, continuous integration systems, etc., you don’t need QA engineers unless they’re setting up continuous integration.

2. The project’s development has begun.

In this phase, user roles and access privileges (borrower, lender, and system administrator in our example) are established while the UI team provides initial page markups (login/register) without sending requests and processing server answers.

3. First flow planning

In our scenario, a basic registration form with an email, user role (borrower/lender), and complete name is planned. Your form should follow these guidelines after research:

• The name must be 2 words
• Only alphanumeric characters allowed after the “@” sign.
• Choose one role (borrower role pre-selected)

Everything seems good at first. However, a QA engineer may inquire about the following:

• Non-Latin characters, apostrophes in entire names?
• What’s the limit for full name and email?
• Should you allow top-domain emails (e.g., abc@net) if possible?
• Should we have escaped (to prevent XSS)?

At this stage, only little QA input needed.

4. First Release

When the initial flows (registration, login, pledge creation, and approval) are complete and capacity estimates are accurate, you prepare for the first release. If your product is simple, it may tested by you or by the development team. After the release, you’ll have minor bugs, but everything will function.

What happens if QA engineers are involved?

If they not engaged from the start, QA engineers must now create the Product Test Strategy, Test Plan, and assure a successful product launch. For this reason, a QA engineer will design Regression Testing (which will cover all the created functionality). This time-consuming method helps stabilize release candidates and reduce product problems. Unfixed bugs will labelled as “known problems” so consumers may wait until they fixed. Several flows repeated during regression testing (as a creation of a pledge). The basic functionality may need improvements in the near future. So it’s good to conduct automated tests to make sure no bug fixes or new features have damaged the core.

5. Support and development

You’re asked to build a CRM on lenders (as it is quite hard for financial organizations to maintain pledges provided via your application). This phase will involve user model changes (adding addresses, linking to a financial organization, etc.). During this stage, you must check that current functionality hasn’t changed and implement automated tests. If automated tests are available, this step might take up to 30 minutes to check everything is operating correctly and to spot any flaws. You’ll be able to regulate the situation and postpone time- and resource-intensive elements. If your program under support, automated testing may reduce release delivery by 1-2 hours (including running autotests, analyzing the report, manual smoke tests of fixed defects, branching, and updating). We remind you that we are ready to provide software testing and QA services and help optimize your business.